


letting the water fall

by MissSpock



Series: celebrate the night (it's the fall before the climb) [1]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Onesided FitzSimmons, slight AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-11
Updated: 2015-09-11
Packaged: 2018-04-20 07:23:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4778582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissSpock/pseuds/MissSpock
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jemma Simmons is tired of being prey. A character study of Season 2.</p>
            </blockquote>





	letting the water fall

They tell her he’s going to pull through and the very same day she packs her bags and she walks away.

They set up an apartment for her. A temporary living space, easily defendable should the need arise. Skye picks out the furniture, hopes it will feel more like home (home is at the bottom of the ocean, salty sea, salty tears and water-logged confessions), May stops her in the hangar, gives her her very first gun (the sound of discharge still haunts her dreams along with Ward’s face behind the glass, stomach plummeting when they sink and her world explodes into waves and hands beating against glass), and Coulson kisses her forehead before he leaves, makes her promise she’ll come back (she tries to keep a straight face but her voice wavers; she can’t work out how to lie to herself).

When it’s over, Simmons is left alone staring into the mirror at an unfamiliar face ( _sleek hair, shining eyes, childish face, childish dreams, childish hope_ ) in an unfamiliar bathroom, an unfamiliar weapon ( _do no harm, needles, drugs, and blood and the last gulp of oxygen thousands of feet down_ ) tucked into her waistband, and no shadow looking over her shoulder. No one to finish her sentences or her tea, no one to bump into her elbow, no one to discuss biomechanical theory and no one to share a sandwich with.

She’s changed but her face hasn’t. So she picks up the scissors tucked into her duffle bag, cuts her hair and puts on the curling iron. The tresses at her feet are the ashes, and the curls still warm in her hand framing her face are the flames. When she looks into her own eyes she doesn’t find fear (she has seen terror in her reflection before, bright-eyed, optimistic, and blind and then terror, settling into her bones like it always belonged in the hollow between her ribcage and heart, the absolute knowledge that they are the hunters and she is the prey).

She decides she’ll have to live without her shadow.

Simmons waltzes into HYDRA headquarters a different woman. She passes every test with a hint of a smile and the words on her tongue are almost truths. For the first time in a long while her bones are still. When she lies through her teeth, her hands are steady.

(“My loyalties are with science.” With the things she creates with her hands. With Coulson’s quiet humor and the lines of May’s pursed lip. With Skye’s sarcastic honesty. With Fitz’s steady heartbeat on the monitor. With SHIELD. Because that’s what she needs to be, capable of stretching herself over death and danger and look the enemy in the eye, as steady behind the barrel of a gun as she is in the lab)

Sometimes she reaches for the gun when she updates Coulson and the team (she keeps the conversation short and to the point. Their voices scare her more than the noises in her apartment do), runs her fingertips along the handle and the barrel, ghosting over the trigger, and considers pulling it. She’s satisfied with the knowledge that if HYDRA walks through the door, she’ll put a bullet in every man's head, and she’ll fall asleep with her back to the wall, pointer finger still loosely curled around the trigger.

Her lies fall through. Her gun is sitting beside a bowl of mushy cereal on her bedside table. She becomes their prey again, and she has nothing left except to run, 

Trip and Bobbi Morse save her. The same Bobbi Morse who will betray them all. (Ward saves her once, catches her as she is falling from the sky. The next time she falls it’s his fault.)

Things change. 

She goes back to the lab but her hands are never as steady pouring chemicals into tubes as they are holding a gun. Simmons doesn’t look Fitz in the eye (not sure if it’s because she knows she can’t look at him the way he looks at her or if it’s because his presence reminds her of what she needs to be, of what she fails to be, and every time he searches for a word and Mack offers it to him she’s reminded that she can’t be his shadow anymore), and Fitz speaks to her like her reappearance pains him.

Maybe it does.

She banishes herself to the edges. Tries to build it back up slowly with her hands. They work like a team simply because they have been trained to do so, at Puerto Rico. They nearly lose Mack. They lose Triplett. Skye emerges from the smoke.

She remembers the very first moment she knows without a fact to trust Trip. Not the first time she meets him, or the first time she put her life in his hands. What she remembers is SHIELD, falling down around her, friend and foe blurred together and Trip pulled her into a room and when she asked him why she should trust him, he grinned and said, “Because I’m trustworthy.”

Simmons sneaks into the lab late at night after that. And she builds. Frantically she builds, schematics of an entire arsenal appearing under her (steady) fingers, welding parts with (unwavering) hands. She has to work. She practices pursing her lips like May does to hide the the trembling when she’s still. 

She doesn’t tremble when the base is shaking around her. Skye has not emerged completely unscathed after all. It doesn’t shock or hurt her. What does is the fact that Fitz knew, knew and lied.

He looks at her and he doesn’t see her. He sees a war machine.

And maybe that’s what Simmons has become, somewhere along the line.

They send Skye away. 

Bobbi and Mack show their hand not long after that. Simmons figures it out faster than she would have just a year ago. She takes down Bobbi by herself–she’s become an expert on what people expect of her and how to use it to her advantage–and then gas is streaming out of the vents and the next thing she knows she’s waking up next to Fitz in the lab.

She holds his hand. He doesn’t pull away.

It’s not encouraging because then he’s storming into the lab, and he talks to her like she’s a traitor. 

Maybe she is. By now, Bobbi has more in common with her than Fitz.

She gives him the real toolbox to ferry away to safety. Holds up under Bobby and Gonzales at first. But May walks into the room and May’s better. May understands the struggle.

_You have to make tough choices, and no one will understand, and it will hurt like hell._

In the end May throws Fitz under the bus. Simmons can’t protect him, even when she sends him far away from the battlefield.

Coulson comes back. He brings Grant Ward with him.

There’s a mission. There’s always a mission.

Her hands shake when Ward is in the room. It gets hard to breathe and she could almost taste salt on the inside of her mouth. She walks onto the bus with an entire bag of explosives strapped onto her back and she doesn’t ever let go of them.

She tries to kill him.

(Not the prey anymore, now she’s the huntress.)

Simmons throws and misses and the atomic shredder attaches to Bakshi instead. Ward says he’s disappointed in her (she doesn’t shake now, doesn’t beat against him like she beat against the glass of an escape pod falling into the sea, no, she looks him the eye, huntress, not prey, she looks him in the eye and she says, “Do it”), she thinks it's ironic.

After all, he makes her into what she is. 

Because when she returned from the bottom of the ocean, clinging to her best friend’s body, Simmons made a choice. Shaking, cold, and soaked from head to toe, Simmons makes her choice.

When HYDRA asked her why she joined SHIELD, she told them what they wanted to hear.

_I was a 17 year old girl with two PhDs and millions of questions._

And hid the truth for herself. 

Jemma Simmons joins SHIELD because she shields people. Because she’s been there and she doesn’t want anyone else to be (prey) like her. She makes the tough choice and becomes (the huntress) a mask because wearing her heart on her sleeve nearly gets her killed.

This is the story of a girl at the cusp of a war, who holds on to herself for as long as she possibly could and then lets go and wades into battle. 

Ward may be disappointed in her (he doesn't have the right). But Simmons is proud.

**Author's Note:**

> People were saying that Jemma had deviated from her "sweet scientist who wouldn't hurt a fly" image and I thought the character evolution was fascinating and probably has a lot to do with all that trauma she sustained during the HYDRA incident.


End file.
